


Aftershocks

by Fudgyokra



Series: Limits [5]
Category: Green Arrow (Comics)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Daddy Issues, Daddy Kink, Dom/sub Undertones, Drama, M/M, Porn With Plot, Restraints, Rough Sex, Time Skips, Wet & Messy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-03-07 08:06:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18869164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: Roy weathers through Dinah and Ollie’s emotional fallout.





	Aftershocks

**Author's Note:**

> This is officially the last fic in the Limits series! Thank you guys for reading these and supporting me! Y'all are the bomb. <3

In every part of his mind, Roy was dogged by the image of Dinah’s face when she had found them together. When he thought about Ollie, he saw her. When he thought about patrol, he saw her. When he left himself to his silence in hopes of catching at least a little sleep, he saw her. The blankness of her expression, as if she’d been unable to process the truth or their bodies laid bare before her.

What emerged on the other side was monstrous grief.

From the sounds of the argument alone, tonight harbored the worst of the fallout. He’d halfway expected Dinah not to return to the house at all after her evening shift, but had crept into his bedroom an hour beforehand in blatant surrender, regardless. She wasn’t the avoidant type, so it only surprised him a little that she’d walk right into the fire the day after they’d been caught. Red-handed, red-faced, panting and moving and trading words almost as damning as the actions themselves.

From his bed, he stared into the mirror propped up on the opposite wall, watching his face go sickly pale at the sound of glass crashing from somewhere deeper in the house. She and Ollie had been at each other’s throats for about twenty minutes now, and it didn’t sound pretty.

Guilt roiled in Roy’s stomach, but he didn’t move. Hardly dared to breathe as he heard Dinah’s voice crescendo into the first words he’d been able to hear all night, which were few but dismal all the same: “—to our __son!__ ”

He could hear the voices, but only the reverberating timbre of them. Louder were the stomping footfalls coming dangerously close to his room, and even if he knew neither of them would involve him in this tirade tonight, the anxiety at the thought built and grew until it felt like something solid lodged in his throat. But the steps, only one pair audible now, passed him. Then, nearly in unison, the door to the master bedroom and the one at the front of the house slammed closed.

He took a deep breath and held it until he physically couldn’t any longer. For a while, he wondered if he’d find Oliver creeping into his room to berate or blame him. Or even something else, something impossible and selfishly indulgent. Something Roy felt worse for wanting, even in this moment. He knew it wasn’t going to be real, but a traitorous part of him still wanted Ollie to be __relieved__ that Dinah was gone—that Roy was there to catch his fall.

It felt terrible to think, awful to condemn her to something so miserable, but the images didn’t stop despite his brain frantically trying to shut them out. Instead, they persisted in flashes, tempting him with every errant twitch of his hips and self-loathing thought that crossed his mind. Stubbornly, for the rest of the night, he kept his hands fisted in his pillow beneath his head.

By the time the sun rose, he hadn’t slept at all.

* * *

 

The house was empty all morning. It was early when Roy got out of bed, the dawn a sad gray straining into its brighter blues, yet there wasn’t a breath of air disturbed. He heard no footsteps from upstairs nor from the kitchen, where ruins of dinner plates and drinking glasses littered the otherwise clean tiles. A couple of the cabinets had been left open, so Roy dutifully closed them, stepping on a shard of glass he hadn’t seen in the process and cursing into the bleak emptiness.

After bandaging his foot in the bathroom, staring into the mirror, and playing a couple of unfulfilling rounds on the pinball machine in the games room, he grumbled his way back into the kitchen to sweep up the disaster. The silence was oppressive. Only the sound of the tap dripping and the glass clinking into the plastic dustpan kept him company, and the longer it went on, the more he wondered about why he was doing it. Why stay behind to clean up their mess?

 _ _Because it’s partly your fault,__ a voice in his head suggested, small but omnipresent despite how he tried to shove it down. Every glance toward the curtained windows above the sink dragged it back, as if facing the daylight triggered the truth to flee from the shadows of his mind. The parts he didn’t want to look at. Didn’t want to acknowledge were there.

Not long after he’d dumped the refuse, the front door opened, sending sparks of anxiety through him that, like the intrusive thoughts, he wished he could will away. If the silence had been bad, the breaking of it was somehow worse.

He was sitting cross-legged on the countertop with his half-eaten sandwich still in his hands when Oliver walked inside. Whatever possessed him to catch the man’s gaze, whether it be some layer of craziness or a strange desire to be yelled at, he wasn’t sure, but Ollie seemed just as surprised to see him as the other way around. The startle in his expression remained as he looked the room over, and then, with a click of the door, it twisted into something almost as guilty as Roy had been feeling throughout the whole dawn of this strange new day.

“You didn’t have to clean that up, kiddo,” he said, and Roy’s mouth curled instinctively into a sneer.

“Well, you weren’t going to do it.”

A snort. “You’re probably right.”

Silence. Roy took another bite of his sandwich, watched Ollie mill around before he swiped a beer from the fridge and pinched the cap off with a pleasant hiss of sound and steam. Something in Roy’s gut stirred, but he didn’t let it win. “What happened?” As if he didn’t already know.

Oliver smiled, but it was a sad little thing. “You’re not much of a comedian.”

Roy took the jibe poorly, something sour striking him deep, rising in his throat like bile. He knew Ollie only meant that the ruckus had clearly been overheard, but it still felt like an accusation, as if he could somehow see through Roy’s eyes last night, picking out the image of Dinah’s figure in the doorway while she watched them pant and jerk and moan.

He set his sandwich down on the countertop. “I just heard a little bit of it,” he said, which was only half of a greater, rawer truth. “So, she found out.” Ollie’s eyes narrowed but he said nothing, instead downing part of his beer.

For the first time in a while, Roy felt the need to joke not out of self-preservation, but out of something he was afraid felt strangely like pity. “Am I man enough for one of those, yet?”

Silently, Ollie handed him the bottle and left the room.

It stung to know how deeply Dinah’s leaving affected him, on a level Roy wasn’t sure was completely objective. They’d both been responsible for betraying her, and yet something in him yearned to suck up all the blame like it was a lifeline, praying for punishment or anything else that would unravel this nightmare world. Beneath that, though, a familiar ache of jealousy.

He hopped off the counter to pad after, and even the soft sound of his footfalls on the carpet seemed to startle his mentor, like for some reason he didn’t expect Roy to be there at all. When he looked at him, his gaze flickered down to his feet: one hastily bandaged, the other still dressed in a sock.

“Glass got you, huh?” he said with a smile so bleak it almost made Roy cringe. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

Roy searched his face for a second, then steadily tipped the bottle back against his mouth. Let the cold glass touch, wrapped his lips around the opening and took a sizzling sip. It did no good to calm his nerves, but at least Oliver was looking at him with something besides pain, and that was a start. He licked a spilled drop from his bottom lip, hoping in vain to taste more than alcohol. Something human. Something meant for him.

“It’s fine,” he answered at last. “I should have been more careful.”

“You and me both.” Ollie took the beer back, took a drink that lingered much like Roy’s had.

Something clawed its way to the surface, hungry and rabid. “What’s going to happen with the wedding?”

“It’s on hold.”

Roy’s brows shot up. “On hold? You’re—” __Kidding. Lying. Something!__ “…Serious.” He didn’t know why, but the need to get the words out triumphed over his good sense, and he said, with some incredulity, “You think she’s still going to marry you after that?”

Before he could soften the blow, Ollie’s forearm caught him by the chest, slamming him against the wall with conviction Roy had only seen in his dreams thus far, shaking him more than bodily down to the core. “You’re not too great at keeping your mouth shut,” Ollie said, voice low and dangerous enough to bring that spark back to the breaths passing between them.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t answer my question, old man.”

For the first time, his ribald, locked-up fantasies manifested, and instead of leaving him stranded or forcing him away, Ollie dragged him in by the front of his shirt and kissed him viciously. Teeth and tongue and vindication of every ounce of guilt Roy had ever felt over wishing this would happen to him just once.

It felt wrong, but he was willing to play the game, anyway. “That doesn’t answer it either,” he breathed, watching Oliver’s hand as it set the bottle onto the dining room table and instead hooked between Roy’s thighs, spreading them far enough apart to cup him through his clothes.

“It doesn’t matter. No use talking about it.” Both lies, but Roy did his part and snorted a laugh that held no real merit.

“I can play wifey,” he harshly joked, punctuated with a bite at the other’s bottom lip.

His shorts fell neatly around his ankles, and he didn’t have to look down to know that Ollie’s zipper was coming undone. “Shut up,” he replied, his expression hurt—perfectly matched to every dark desire in Roy’s head, and to the way Ollie hoisted him around his waist, back against the wall, and pushed into him dry.

Roy still moaned, throwing his head against the plaster, curling his toes the further he was forced along Ollie’s cock. He meant to say something more, meant to ask questions, but instead found himself being dragged up and down against the wall, screaming words that only halfway resembled the pleas he wanted to make. It __hurt__ but he loved it, craved it, wanted more of it.

Somewhere in the fray, he’d reached down to touch himself, but only managed one experimental stroke before Ollie hooked one arm around his back and used his other hand to slam Roy’s wrist against the drywall. With the shift in weight came a sense of falling, of sliding down and being helpless, and Roy liked that too, in a sick sort of way. His free arm braced his body, but the rest was up to Oliver, holding him down on his cock with the power to let him fall, pull him off and drop him to the floor aching and spread open, if he wanted. But he didn’t; he kept pumping into him, the slide fraught with friction and certainly uncomfortable for them both, but at the moment it didn’t seem to matter.

The angle dropped all of Roy’s weight down, aiming every thrust deep against parts of him too sensitive to take without a yell at each bounce. They were loud now that they could be, and something about that freed him, even if he screamed himself hoarse and felt the tears track down his face before he even noticed he was crying.

To Oliver’s credit, he seemed worried at the tears, but Roy shook his head violently back and forth and breathed a sincere, “Keep going. Don’t you dare stop.”

His mentor’s mouth lifted into a smile, and that was sincere, too. “Who said you could give me orders?”

Dumbly, Roy moaned against Ollie’s shoulder when he leaned in and hefted him up higher, hit the right spot to make his thighs tighten and his abs flex with a jolt and a gasp torn straight from the deepest parts of him. “I’m—I can give orders,” he said, and might have laughed at the way he sounded if he’d been in a different state of mind.

“That so? Order me around, then. Let me see some gumption.”

 _ _Tell me how you really feel about me. About her. Tell me what happened. What’s__ going __to happen.__

“Bend me over the table and __take__ me, damn it.”

Oliver growled, an uncaged beast slamming Roy down against the wood, knocking the beer over in the process. Neither of them paid it any mind, simply let it drip onto the carpet in a fizzy stream. Roy’s toes curled into the cold, wet stain it made, unbothered when hands gripped his hips with all the strength Ollie could ever put behind a bowstring before he entered him again, fucking him against the edge of the table so powerfully that, were it not for his fingers taking the brunt of the damage, Roy’s hips would surely be bruising purple.

Somehow, the idea of being protected from something so trivial made him shiver, his stomach hit with a pang of warning that he was about to cum. He could finish so easily just like this. But then, against the nape of his neck, raising goosebumps and making his nipples peak painfully against the hard wood, Oliver said softly, “You’re not done ‘til I say you’re done,” and wrapped a hand around him tightly enough to hurt.

Roy’s wounded keen didn’t dissuade the grip, nor did his fingers clawing desperately at the man’s fist. “No, no, wait! I’m so close, __don’t—__ ” Too late; the pleasure plateaued, leaving him shaking against the table so hard he had to press his forehead to the wood to ground himself. Afterward, a simpering whine, which he regretted making the instant it passed his lips if only because it made Oliver coo encouragements in his ear. That only made him more desperate to finish.

“Thought we were letting __me__  give orders,” Roy panted, squirming against the hand in search of the tiniest mite of friction, without success.

“You can. You tell me how and where you wanna get it, and I’ll deliver ‘til you can’t walk anymore.”

Past the frustration of being denied and the ache that went with it, Roy grinned against the table and said, with all the sass he could muster, “Well, I never did get to finish that sandwich.”

In the space of seconds, he was dragged on wobbling legs back into the kitchen, picked up and sat on the counter, and then stretched around Ollie’s cock again like it didn’t matter how lubricated he was or wasn’t, as long as the man could get his fill. Roy knew it wasn’t true—knew that if he asked, they’d do this right, even take it slow, but when he sat back on his hands and let Ollie hook his legs over those broad shoulders, the last thing he wanted was to be interrupted.

The truth, which he’d leave as hidden as could be under the circumstances, was that he liked it this way. Always envisioned a world where they could be as rough and fast and loud as they wanted, anywhere they wanted, without the threat of prying eyes.

He didn’t remember how long they’d gone on, but it must have been a while, going by the number of rooms their exploits spanned. It hurt so deliciously to be trotted around the place he might have grown up in, bent over every available surface until his back ached too much to arch and Ollie started laying him out, letting Roy wrap his legs around him until it must have been hard to breathe.

Oliver finished twice before he finally allowed Roy to do the same. Nothing beat the heavenly, stinging shame of crawling in front of the unlit fireplace dripping two rounds worth of cum from between his thighs and having his own orgasm wrung forcefully out of him by the man’s mouth, until Roy’s thighs quivered on either side of his head while he clawed at the blacked brick beneath him. Until his fingertips were stained with soot and he emptied himself down Ollie’s throat with a cry so broken it must have been pathetic to hear.

If it had been, the man didn’t let on. Contrarily, he hovered over Roy’s spent form and gingerly brushed his hair back from his face as if they were meant to be here, covered in filth on the parlor floor, exhausted but __together.__

A long, thoughtful silence pervaded. At its end, Roy finally gathered the energy to say, “I think we managed to bang on every available surface in this house.”

Oliver laughed, and Roy followed suit. Both of them ignored the obvious hanging fact: Every surface except the bed, where they’d been found out and everything had fallen apart at the seams.

* * *

 

Dick wasn’t listening to him. Hadn’t been for a while now, but Roy didn’t really mind in light of the fact a sounding board worked just as well for his needs. Talking to Dick often made him feel better, or was at least a good way to de-stress, but the irritating thing about him was that he was always trying to give advice, and sometimes Roy just wanted to bitch until he couldn’t bitch anymore.

“He said the wedding was ‘on hold.’” It was a gripe that finally managed to divert Dick’s attention from his video game, not that Roy noticed at first. “Am I supposed to believe that?”

When he earned a response, it actually surprised him. “He said __what?__ ”

“Right? It’s like when someone says, ‘you have really nice hands.’ What they mean is ‘I really want you to finger me.’ They’re just trying to be polite about it.”

Dick didn’t look amused. “Why do you do that?” he asked, and Roy blanked for a few long seconds.

“What do you mean?”

“Cover your feelings with jokes and sex?”

“I—” He paused, furrowed his brows, and looked away from Dick’s far-too-honest eyes. “I mean, shit, dude, your guess is as good as mine.”

“Roy…”

“I guess because it feels better than telling the truth. Is that what you wanted to hear?” He ran his hands through his hair, forgetting the bun he’d heaped it into and succeeding only in undoing several strands. Frustrated, he took it down and redid it, mostly as an excuse to avoid Dick’s gaze.

“No. Nobody wants to hear that.”

“I’m not the only one who does it. Christ, every time I try to bring this whole thing up to Ollie, he turns it into sex.” Despite himself, he snorted and said, “I’m starting to get sore, you feel me? It’s like, the least you could do is talk to me about your problems. You can do it while you’re fucking me, man. I don’t mind, but it’s gotta be __really__ good sex if—”

“Roy!”

Startled by the snap in Dick’s tone, he hesitated. “I’m doing it again, huh?” Sighing, he dropped his hands into his lap while he thought. Dick didn’t interrupt, amazingly, and he had to hand it to him that he really was helpful when it came down to the important stuff. Roy just hated that he always had to be __right.__ “Shit. I’ve been avoiding Dinah, too. I haven’t spoken to her since…well, that night.”

A hand touched his shoulder, so gentle it almost hurt to acknowledge. Still, Roy made himself look Dick in the eye, earning a nod for the effort, even while his own face remained staunchly grim. “Maybe you should visit her, then.”

“And have her bite my head off? Wouldn’t a phone call work just as well?”

The answer came loud and clear, even without words: Dick rolled his eyes, going back to his video game and leaving Roy to grapple with his choices.

“Fine, fine,” he complained at last. “I’m going. You don’t have to be a know-it-all.”

Even after standing and heading for the door, he could feel his friend’s grin burning into his back. “Break a leg,” Dick said.

* * *

 

On the first two tries, his knocks were too quiet to be heard, controlled by his subconscious desire to avoid doing this at all, and by the third repetition, dawdling neighbors were starting to eye him with all the suspicion one might afford a creepy solicitor hell-bent on making a sale.

Eventually, it worked, and he could thank his lucky stars he didn’t have to bake in the heat any longer once the door swung open.

It had been two weeks since he’d last seen Dinah, but he was confident she hadn’t become a redhead since then. The answering face certainly wasn’t hers. Roy blinked in confused silence for so long that he must have looked like a lunatic, but was thankfully saved by one unamused Barbara Gordon in the entryway wheeling herself aside to allow him in.

“Been a while since I’ve seen _you,_ ” she said, and Roy rubbed the back of his neck at her tone. Clipped, but seemingly not at him, since her expression was soft and her eyes kind. Either she didn’t have the capacity to be angry with him, or she had a very good poker face. He wouldn’t put the latter past a bat.

“Oh, yeah?” As he glanced around the living room for any sign of Dinah, it became clear his hopes to avoid idle conversation were going to be dashed.

Barbara snorted. “I haven’t been hanging around the Manor as much.”

“Me neither.” He looked at her, noticing the bags under her bespectacled eyes, as if sleep had been evading her for several hours—or perhaps days—too many to be healthy. He wouldn’t put that past a bat, either. “Too much work elsewhere?” he guessed. She nodded, lips pursing, and he tried not to look at her again, wishing beyond reason that the guilt gnawing at him would disappear if he could only will her out of sight.

“She’ll be out in a second,” she said at last, dredging up a sigh that sounded as if it’d come from the very depths of her tired soul. “I’m sure you two have a lot to talk about.”

“She told you?” Roy asked, suddenly and sharply encumbered with the urge to run. In a sad act of irony, the jolt worked against him, because the instant he felt it he was locked in place, even as soft footsteps padded down the hall toward them.

Barbara wheeled herself away with a nod to him in passing. Knowingly, she said, “She tells me everything,” and then disappeared down the hall just as Dinah materialized to take her place.

Her attention caught on Roy with an audible gasp and a jerk upward at her towel—the only thing she wore. “Oh! Well, apparently _you_ don’t tell _me_ everything!” she cried over her shoulder, toward Barbara’s retreating, snickering form. Roy, wishing with every passing second that he could sink into the ground, shielded his eyes with one hand and groaned a greeting, which she returned breathlessly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t expect you to…”

“I know,” he interrupted, desperate to get to the point and flee. Never see her again, if that’s what she wanted. At that moment it certainly seemed likely, to say little of all the terrible moments before. “I just, er, came to talk about what happened.”

Just as he feared, Dinah’s silence and eventual sigh made his heart hurt. “Come on,” she instructed.

He looked at her as she disappeared back into the hall, prompting him to half-jog into position behind her. She locked herself in her bedroom to dress, but the obstacle between them couldn’t lessen the blow that came next, expected or not. “I don’t blame you, you know.”

Roy’s chest felt cold, even with the adrenaline spiking in his veins. He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to ask, but, then, he wasn’t sure of many things lately. “Because I’m a kid?” Blunt, swift. Like a death blow.

A brief pause, and then, from the other side of the door: “I know what you’re going to say, Roy. You’re going to tell me you’re grown enough to understand what you were doing. That you want to take part of the blame.”

He didn’t respond, mostly because she was right,and something about being known so intimately by this woman he’d betrayed cut deeper than he thought. Dinah filled the silence as if letting it hang on Roy’s shoulders never occurred to her, and for that he was grateful. “I want you to know I can’t do that. Even if it’s true, even if you’re just as much a guilty party, I just…I can’t be mad at __you,__ even if you wish I would be.”

While Roy was staring silently at the patterns in the grain, the door swung open, revealing Dinah in her impeccable clothes and damp, braided hair, looking every bit like the tough woman she was. The only crack in the façade was the sadness in her eyes, which he stared into with a kind of focus he’d normally only reserve for training; if she wasn’t going to let him take the blame, the least he could do was face her hurt. Feel the self-hatred dig into his flesh, through the muscle, all the way down until it burrowed inside him and festered like he deserved.

“Roy,” she said sharply, snapping him out of it with a call of his name and a hand on his elbow alike. “Don’t. Come in here, sit down with me.”

Numbly, he followed, passing the glowing green of Barbara’s study on the path into the living room once more. Dinah sat. Roy remained standing across from her, arms loosely wrapped around his waist as if to hold himself steady and steel himself for what he had to ask.

Dinah remained inquisitively silent, far too patient for him to push the words out, which he finally did. In a tumble of raw emotions dumped unceremoniously between them, he said, “Oliver said the wedding was on hold.”

“That’s what I told him, yes.”

“Is it true?”

Dinah’s smile held no mirth. “Ollie and I both know it’s not. What we had, it’s done. He’s just trying to preserve his pride.”

“What, for my sake?”

“And for his own.”

“That certainly sounds like him.” Roy smiled back at her then, the same empty gesture.

“We’ll all get past this,” Dinah answered, stealing a glance toward the hallway and then abruptly snapping her gaze back to him as if she hadn’t really meant to look. “Each in our own way, we will move on.”

“Is that supposed to be your goodbye?” He tried for a smirk but fell short of the mark, ending up with a grimace that had Dinah’s brows scaling her forehead in seconds.

“Oh—no, no, I’m going to be here. We’re going to see each other again. All of us, actually.”

“Why would you want to see him again?”

Something about her shaky sigh set him on edge. Nothing could have prepared him for the way she gestured at him, pulled him down onto the couch when he approached, and smoothed his hair back in a gesture so motherly he knew he blanched at the contact.

More world-turning still was the way she tilted her head and smiled so softly, even as her whispers tore the stable ground right out from beneath Roy’s feet. “Honey,” she said, tucking a strand of his hair behind his ear, “I’m pregnant.”

* * *

 

“So, when were you gonna tell me?”

Oliver’s brow lifted beneath his mask. Although he didn’t turn his face toward him, Roy had an inkling that he was being side-eyed through the films and so bared his teeth in a scowl. Escaping the inevitable, being Ollie’s M.O., meant that the next ten minutes were grueling as he hopped from one rooftop to the next and forced Roy to keep up, light on his feet despite the slick of the earlier evening rain. He almost thought to warn the man about putting them both in danger, but he supposed the point was to get his mind off the questions.

“Don’t expect me to believe you didn’t know,” he kept on, sliding down a drainage pipe with a burst of noise that made Oliver flinch from where he’d landed in the alley seconds prior. “You know I don’t like to be kept out of the loop.”

“I know you don’t. Believe it or not, I did intend to tell you.” Ollie’s answer came with a smile, a show-off of his talent for saying all the right things while also managing to improve Roy’s mood by exactly zero percent. “It was a shock to me, too.”

“That unprotected sex results in pregnancies?”

A laugh, sounding cheerful but likely far from it. Predictable. “You’re aware we were planningto start a family eventually, aren’t you?”

All right, so that one stung deeper than Roy would have liked. Oliver __had__ a family, damn it, and the person who’d put up with his shit the most was standing right there in front of him in this stupid rain-soaked back alley and—he had to say something, but the right words wouldn’t come.

Instinctively, when the man began to move, Roy grabbed his sleeve, feeling impossibly like a lost child trying to cling to his father.

He expected to have his hand slapped away, but Ollie only turned toward him, looked at him with a patient, expectant face that boiled his blood, and took him aback with words alone. “Sorry. That’s not quite what I meant. I—we’re family, kiddo. It’s not that I don’t know. But that’s…different.”

Honesty. Or at least a carefully-cultivated lie to make Roy feel better. It didn’t work, but he appreciated the effort nonetheless. He tentatively unwound his fingers from the fabric of Ollie’s uniform and curled them around his bicep instead; increasing the touch, shortening the distance with a step. His boots splashed through a puddle, but he hardly noticed. “You’ve got some nerve,” he muttered. “‘Different.’ I’d laugh if I weren’t so pissed off.”

Ollie smiled. It wasn’t the usual loud, cheesy, fake offering. It was soft and sad and held something very real that Roy couldn’t ignore no matter how much he was tempted to try. “You’re always pissed off.”

“Well, you’re always an insufferable prick.”

“Oh, I know.” As if to cement the point, he pulled Roy in by the back of the neck, tilted his head down, hovered close enough for his breath to fan over Roy’s face, and then pressed a chaste kiss to his forehead. “C’mon, we got another four blocks before we’re done tonight.”

Buzzing with nerves from an unknown hearth—or, perhaps, from so many places that he couldn’t discern between them—he tightened his grip on the arm slipping between his fingers and took a step in the opposite direction, toward the wet red brick at his back.

Ollie followed like a dog on a leash, and Roy tried not to think too hard about why he was doing what he was about to do.

It was an unfairly cheap shot, but playing his mentor’s game seemed like the only way to end this absurd dance around the issues. With conviction, he let the self-satisfied smirk slide easily on his face like moving a pawn on a chess board, watched Ollie’s eyes track it before leaning up to initiate the earlier kiss he had avoided and then deepening it on contact. He wasn’t surprised to find Oliver’s lips wet and cold from the sporadic drizzles that had been dogging them all night, or to find them part willingly for his earnest exploration. Even less surprising was how fast a large thigh slotted itself between Roy’s, encouraging them to part and pressing upward hard enough to give the suggestion he was hoping for.

He backed away a fraction, held Oliver by the back of the neck and got his words out in a rush. “Would you have picked me over her if I were older?”

Since they were spoken before Ollie could sense the danger in his body language, there were no preventative measures against the way he tensed. Roy expected it when he tried to pull away and held steadfast, one hand curling around his neck that much tighter while the other started expertly on the ties at the front of his pants.

“Speedy,” Oliver warned.

“I want you to tell me something,” he replied, talking fast and moving faster. His hand yanked apart the last troublesome laces and then slid into the front of the pants, groping for what he could reach before his wrist was snatched in a rough grip. He wasn’t pulled away, merely held in place, so he used the hesitation to his advantage and rubbed the pads of his fingers over the cotton underwear, feeling the heat beneath and the pulse given in unfettered intrigue. “I need to know,” he continued seriously, “that I’m not just a game to you.”

“What do you want to know?” Ollie asked, voice tight. Roy couldn’t tell if it was from the stimulation or from the annoyance of falling victim to his own tactics, but he didn’t stop to consider before he wormed his hand beneath the boxers as well and stroked him to full hardness as he panted against Ollie’s jaw, letting the beard bristle angry pink marks into the softer skin of his own cheek.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. Good, but that was the easy part.

“Like a son or like you love her?”

“Neither.”

Roy paused. Ollie took the inch of give and ran a mile with it, taking apart the careful plan he’d laid out by removing the hand from his uniform and pinning it to the wall. It wasn’t rough or possessive, more of a calculated way to keep it immobile so he could win this round like he won all the others—taking the spoils of what Roy was all too willing to give while not having to give up any answers in turn.

He’d lament it if he had gotten the chance, but the surprise waiting for him this time was not only the rain returning but the fact that Ollie was speaking past it, answering him instead of fleeing like he’d done so many times before. When Roy visibly strained forward to hear past the sudden downpour, Oliver met him halfway and spoke beside his ear. “If we’re being honest, it’s in a way I shouldn’t.”

“Then—why—” Roy managed to stutter out, only to realize he had no plan past getting this seemingly easy and succinct truth. In all his fantasies it felt more real, more earth-shattering to know, but in reality it sounded so __simple.__ “Why were you with her?” And that, aloud, sounded stupid, but he held his ground.

To his credit, Oliver didn’t laugh. “I love her too.”

“More than me.”

“Not more, not less. Just differently.”

“You’re a terrible man.”

“I know.”

Roy’s breathing would have stuttered audibly if not for the sound of the rain. Despite how awfully his hair stuck to his face and how, within seconds, he was soaked and shivering, he still felt warmed by the other’s proximity, or perhaps by the weight of this conversation he’d initiated in all the wrong ways. Wrong ways for right answers, he reasoned.

He needed one more answer. Just one, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to hear it, only that it seemed like the only thing left to ask: “What do we do now?”

Oliver hummed, stepped back, looked out at the glow of the city lights and said, “We move on.”

* * *

 

It was unbearably sunny outside, a curse of the perfect Californian day Roy hated for giving him all those sunburns in years past. He was moody in a button-up shirt and two layers of sunscreen too many when Oliver approached with his drink, plus a cell phone photo at which Roy wrinkled his nose.

“She’s kind of ugly,” he said, which wasn’t really true. Dinah’s newborn looked, by all accounts, like every other newborn Roy had ever seen, but he felt like being crabby more than he felt like being civil, so he flickered his gaze away from the screen and sucked a big, noisy mouthful of Kahlua through the horrid pink straw Oliver had done him the disservice of dropping into it.

“My god, you could be twins.”

“I’m too pretty for you, old man,” he returned without fire, pacing around in his sandals just so the oppressive heat wasn’t baking him where he stood. At least he could bake in motion. “And, for the record, twin jokes when your little gremlin and I officially share a birthday as of two hours ago aren’t as funny as you think they are.”

Ollie pulled Roy against his side with one bare, tanned, and flexed arm that had his mind wandering when the man decided to speak again. “How was Dick’s?”

“A great excuse for not having to step foot inside a hospital.”

“You know, amazingly, Anna’s the __second__  biggest birthday crybaby I’ve had the pleasure of seeing today.”

Roy rolled his eyes. “Beach bars blow.” With fervor, he drained his Kahlua and rattled the ice-filled glass in front of Oliver’s face, watching as the smile lines around his mouth deepened when he laughed and called him a brat so fondly it almost got Roy to preen in his vaguely tipsy state. “Screw it. Take me home.”

“For your seventeen spankings?”

“If you want to lose a hand.”

“Oh, please. You’re all bark and no bite.”

“Try me.”

* * *

 

One more drink and a car ride full of lascivious groping later, Roy was riding the high of lowered inhibitions to his heart’s content. Ollie didn’t have inhibitions to begin with, he’d joked, right before getting bent over the man’s lap in the bed and divested of clothing in quick, impatient yanks.

At first, he pressed his forehead against the sheets and laughed at the smacks that came down on him, but after a few rounds of restarting on account of his “misbehaving,” he’d fallen in line faster than his pride would ever allow him to admit.

The next open-palmed slap had him jerking his hips, going nowhere but down against the hardness between Ollie’s legs and making him pant louder amid his counts. “Fifteen! Thank you, sir.” Another smack, and he squirmed again with a soft, shaky moan. “Sixteen. Thank you, sir.”

“One more,” Ollie notified him unnecessarily. By Roy’s count it was actually somewhere closer to forty. He wasn’t sure if he could continue to take them, and despite his inner stubbornness wanting to challenge, his more desperate state of mind was impatient for more than just spankings.

The last one cracked across tender flesh with an embarrassingly loud sound, and a second afterward he relaxed, trembling and huffing into the covers,  grateful for the end of the onslaught. He could feel that he was still hard, cock angry and red in similar fashion to his ass and the backs of his thighs, so ready to be touched he could have begged for it.

Ollie chuckled like something was particularly amusing about his state, and before Roy could tell him to shove it, the man said, “Bad news: You forgot your count.”

Roy’s mouth dropped open around a gasp at another blow, which got him to jerk his hips again, finding overwhelmingly satisfying friction against the rough cloth of Oliver’s jeans. And then one more; this time he sucked a breath inward just to plea, putting a stop to another seventeen strikes from ruining his already sure-to-bruise backside. “Wait, wait, seventeen! S _ _eventeen.__ Thank you, sir! __God.__ Thank you, thank you, thank you—”

“Okay, okay, hey… It’s all right, baby.” Oliver shushed him, cutting off his next choked sob of relief by running his fingertips gently along the marks. “Daddy’s proud of you.”

A shudder racked him, drawing goosebumps to the surface of his skin. It only made him that much more aware of how badly he ached, both from the spankings and from the lack of stimulation between his legs. The latter was soothed barely seconds after he thought it, by a hand reaching under him and pressing, trapping his cock against his own stomach until he took the hint and desperately rolled his hips until he was rutting into Ollie’s hand like a dog in heat.

If it weren’t for the promise of something more gratifying, he wouldn’t have been doing something so humiliating. At least, that was what he told himself to ease the burn of shame blooming across his face and down his neck.

He steadied himself on his elbows, trying to control his ragged breathing while Ollie used his free hand to uncap the lubricant and drizzle it unceremoniously between Roy’s cheeks until a whine about the mess it was making got him to stop.

“Just making sure it’s enough,” Ollie said with a laugh. “Once I start, I don’t plan on stopping ‘til I’m finished with you.”

Roy groaned, canting his hips further despite the strain and feeling a whole new rush of embarrassing pleasure from presenting. “Hurry up! Christ.”

When the first finger slid inside, it felt so good he could hardly stand it. Normally, he assured himself he wouldn’t be so easy, but Ollie moved without hurry, feeling him out until the probing made Roy squirm and then adding another seconds before he was about to cave and demand it.

They’d spent a great deal of their most recent sexual encounters doing fast and hard, so the change in pace was frustrating to Roy, who wanted nothing more than to lose himself to the mind-numbing haze and call it a night. Instead, his birthday gift was beginning to feel like more of a birthday torture as Ollie slowly, agonizingly worked his way up to four fingers.

By the time he accomplished that, Roy was already painfully close to the edge, humping pathetically against the hand holding his cock and then back up against the fingers carving their way inside him in annoyingly shallow thrusts. He wanted the real thing, and eventually voiced the thought with a tight groan through gritted teeth.

“Look at you, being so sweet.” Oliver’s voice broke him out of his racing thoughts, and the moment it had, he couldn’t remember a single thing he’d been thinking, only that he was being praised.

Instinctively, the first thing he said back was, “Fuck you.”

It was the wrong answer, going by the soft tutting and withdrawal of fingers. __Good,__ Roy thought, taking it to mean the torment was over and he could finally get fucked good and hard like he wanted. As it turned out, that was equally incorrect.

He found himself being lifted bodily and tossed on the sheets like a discarded toy. The sheer indignation tore a startled sound out of him before he could even think to track Ollie’s paces around the room, which he found was a bad move on his part at the sensation of a handcuff clamping around his wrist and threading through the headboard’s bars until his skin was taut against the smooth metal.

He snatched his other away before it could be grabbed, only to fall victim to the disappointed tutting sound once again. That, paired with the calculatingly gentle way Ollie said his name—almost as though he were a child being urged to give up something he was hiding—prompted him to willingly give his hand over to be chained in place.

When Ollie started rooting through drawers, Roy warily narrowed his eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”

Matter-of-factly: “Punishing you for thinking you’re allowed to have such a dirty mouth.”

In surprising lieu of desire to fight back, his mouth clamped shut at the assertion.

“Good boy,” Ollie said, after the fact. “I’m afraid you’re still gonna take the punishment. I wouldn’t be setting a good fatherly example if I let my brat get away with mouthing off.”

Whatever retort he’d been poised to concoct was cut short along with the furrow of his brow as he stared at the wall in front of him, unable to will the insults past his lips. __Fine, then. Enjoy this for now, then kill him later.__

With a petulant huff, he lowered his chin onto the pillow and let Ollie do as he pleased, which turned out to be getting him acquainted with a brand new spreader bar: A length of gleaming plastic forcing Roy’s legs to be splayed and immovable, save for the brief wiggle he gave to test the bar’s strength.

Finally, he said, “You’re kind of a freak, you know that?”

As expected, Oliver snorted a laugh. “And that’s five __more__ minutes for being a smartass.”

“...Minutes?” Roy craned his neck to peer over his shoulder just as something hard and familiar worked its way inside him. Judging by the chill of the material, it was the vibrator Ollie’d bought him before they had starting officially doing what they were doing, and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place as he groaned in preemptive agony at the knowledge of what his punishment was going to be. “Weren’t the spankings enough?” he complained. “What kind of gift is this?”

Again, Ollie laughed, smoothing a hand down Roy’s already raw skin and giving one more good smack for posterity. He was ashamed to have yelped, but if that hadn’t worked, the way the toy clicked swiftly through the modes to its highest setting would have easily done the trick.

The bad news was the sudden buzzing and a couple of humiliating thrusts against the mattress had him cumming so hard he could hardly breathe for a moment, tightening up all over at the shock of it and dirtying the sheets he collapsed into. The worse news was he had apparently racked up ten minutes of this, and that had hardly been twenty seconds.

“You can’t,” he breathed, yanking first at the cuffs and then trying to shimmy away from the sensation, stopped in his tracks by the bar holding him open. More animated this time, he repeated, “You can’t!” Dizzy with painful pleasure coursing through him, all the way down to his toes, he shuddered, hard. “I swear, I’ll—”

“You’re really close to earning another five minutes, baby.”

That quieted him immediately. What was left of his pride for the day crumbled when Ollie began milling around to bind his ankles to the footboard, moving in focused silence that left only Roy’s wounded whimpers to salt the air around them.

For ten long, aching minutes, he kicked against the soft cloth that now secured his feet, trying to squirm and getting punished for it every time by the friction of his cock against the sheets, each attempt a jolt of heat that felt as though it was striking him straight in the chest.

When the buzzing stopped, he let out a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding, leaving him to wonder when he’d started for it to leave him so dazzlingly breathless. Stars danced behind closed eyes while he recovered, panting with his cheek pressed against the pillow until, abruptly he found his airway blocked again. His eyes shot open in time to find Oliver’s cock jammed down his throat.

At the sudden intrusion, instinct outweighed practice, and Roy sputtered and gagged, eyes watering so badly it ruined the effect of his glare when he picked his head up and aimed a look up at the man through his lashes. Before he could put forth any actual effort, Ollie pulled out and let him pant some more, his own eyes sparkling with mischief. “Sorry, you just looked so cute and peaceful…”

“That you had to go and ruin it?” Roy rasped, cheeks aflame.

“Exactly.”

Roy glanced from Ollie’s face down between his legs, then back up with a toothy grin. “Y’know what? You’re an insufferable prick.”

“I’ll show you an insufferable—” He grabbed a fistful of Roy’s hair and pressed his cock to his lips but stopped before he could properly penetrate, leaving Roy’s tongue lolling against the head, tasting but not quite able to chase the thrill he craved. “Oh, no you don’t,” Ollie said the second Roy started to lap at his slit, dragging him backward until his neck craned almost painfully and he was staring at him with parted lips and wild eyes. “Don’t be cute. If you want it, you have to ask me. Use your big boy words.”

Despite the creeping sense of shame, Roy only fluttered his lashes and teased the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip, savoring the time he got to pull the strings before he acquiesced. “Please,” he said, hardly passing a whisper.

“You can do better than that.”

He could, but the way Ollie was looking down at him, eyes hooded with the particular glint that showed how badly he wanted it made Roy want to bide his time playing coy. It drove them both nuts, but if it didn’t, he figured it wouldn’t be fitting. “I don’t know, daddy,” he said, nailing the second-guessing act as easily as he could slip into his costume. “I don’t think I can __handle__ it.”

Sure enough, Oliver let a growl slip past his defenses, tightening his hand in Roy’s hair until he faked the most obnoxious, high-pitched moan he could muster and destroyed the last of the man’s self-control in one fell swoop.

It was Roy’s playing field for a few blissful minutes while Oliver slammed himself over and over against the back of his throat, playing at pushing all the way in but leaving his ward to drool around the partial thrusts in preparation to take more. Despite the loss in getting him to beg, Ollie didn’t seemed concerned with giving him __all__ of what he wanted, and that left Roy in the loser’s seat once again, trying to strain forward and take more, just to have Ollie’s free hand curl around his throat and press until the blood rushed in his ears so forcefully that his lashes fluttered and his eyes rolled back.

Seconds heaped on seconds where all he could hear was the beat of his own pulse and the slick, messy sounds of Ollie using his mouth to his satisfaction, until he pulled out entirely and stopped with such suddenness that Roy moaned out a delirious, “ _ _More.__ ”

He could faintly hear Oliver groan, but it wasn’t enough to earn compliance. Instead, he merely let go of Roy’s throat and pet his hair until he could suck in a few desperate lungfuls and gain back enough sense to be embarrassed about the obscene amount of drool dripping down his chin. While he ungracefully wiped it off on the pillow, Ollie climbed behind him and drizzled more lubricant, pressing three fingers inside him despite the fact he was already dripping and sloppy.

“What gives?” he groaned, trying to scoot away from the cold wetness running down his balls and thighs until he felt like he needed a bath to rinse away all the slickness.

“I’m giving you what you asked for.” The smile in Ollie’s voice was unmistakable and dangerous.

At first, Roy was grateful for the vibrator sliding easily in place, but with a handful of shallow thrusts that barely whet his appetite, it came out again, making him stubbornly bite back a whine. When the tip was held against him next, just barely testing the resistance of his muscle, he felt something warm and distinctly __human__ ease its way underneath, and the pressure doubled in such a burst of surprise it made him tense at the suggested end.

“Hey! Are you crazy?” he cried, once again failing to squirm away from both the vibrator and Ollie’s cock trying to nudge into his hole at once. Roy looked over his shoulder at him, brows raised in unfettered incredulity. “You’ll split me in half, moron!”

Annoying as ever, Oliver grinned, unnervingly charming in his mission to apparently tear Roy apart. “Relax, would you? You’ll do fine. You always do for me.”

The words soothed, and unlike any other time where he’d bite his head off for even trying to sweet-talk his way into Roy’s good graces, he submitted to the praise and thumped his head back down, closing his eyes against how badly he wanted to roll them and willing his body to relax.

The daunting pressure began anew, threatening to choke the breath out of him if he wasn’t careful to regulate it.

“Don’t worry,” Ollie told him, “if you can’t do it, we’ll just—”

“I can do it,” Roy interjected. Though he had meant to snap, the truth was, in situations like this, anything he said came out sounding like a desperate bid to please. At this point in the game, he wasn’t even sure which was the true emotion and which was the superficial wall he hid behind.

Proudly, earnestly: “There’s my big boy.”

Sinking into the comfort of what counted as viable slander felt better than it had any right to, and Roy sighed at the sensation of being grounded right before he was swept off his feet again, falling over the edge of the known and tumbling into the untested waters beneath. Ollie would be there to catch him, somehow. In spite of everything, Roy believed that.

With enough pressure, a bit of wiggling, and a certain amount of finesse, the tip of the toy popped past the ring of muscle, his body accepting Oliver along with it in a leap of blind faith that felt so overwhelming in the moment he had to be reminded to breathe again, but for a completely different reason than before.

Being fondly urged into taking more, bit by bit, lulled him into a space where all he could do was accept, unable to think about why or how he was doing it, only that he __was.__ The feeling of falling was tremendous on its own, but the sweetly honest moan he earned from behaving made him forget to be put off by his uncharacteristic trustworthiness. If it could only be like this for these moments, then so be it, he decided with another delicate sigh into the creased pillowcase.

“You did it,” Ollie said after a while, sounding so reverent that Roy had half a mind to bask in it. “I’m impressed. You oughta see how you look stretched around it all. It’s obscene, really.”

Falling blind had its drawbacks, after all, because in the last of his haze he muttered, “Take a picture, then, jackass. It’ll last longer.”

A bit of shuffling aside, there was nothing suspicious about the lack of movement until Roy heard the shutter sound from Oliver’s phone and realized with a start that he’d actually done it. He was on the cusp of arguing when the photo was unceremoniously shoved before him, and every bit of vocal ability died when the shame caught up and choked it out of him.

Obscene was right, he thought. He must be a masochist, or some kind of deranged slut, to be able to handle everything shoved in him. He groaned, feeling strangely violated at __seeing__ the stretch, and Ollie leaned over him, pressing so close it was almost protective. His beard tickled Roy’s ear when he spoke. “Don’t worry. That’s for my eyes only.”

“I don’t know how you always manage to talk me into this kind of shit,” Roy finally muttered, complete with a dramatic eye-roll that Ollie couldn’t even see. It felt more for himself, anyway.

Still against his ear, a chuckle. Low, comforting. “Do you want me to take it out?” Presently, Roy felt the toy jostle against his inner walls, making him tighten without intent, gasping at the sudden fullness, satisfying in a greedy way that made him want to rut back against it all. Fuck himself on them both until he came purely from the knowledge of how much he could take.

A brief grunt in answer didn’t particularly convey any of those thoughts, but Roy preferred it that way: to keep them deep and dirty, hidden away from the eyes taking him in as the toy was slowly removed. Relieved, he could feel himself clutch desperately around Ollie’s cock, driving his hips back in a sudden spasm that made the desire blossom in his gut.

Instantly, Ollie grasped his hips and pulled out, one plunge forward not enough to sate either of them. So, with a heady groan, he did it again, and again. Over and over until the headboard was hitting the wall and Roy bit the pillow to stifle his shouts, although his hands gave him away by twisting and jerking in their restraints.

It felt like too much, even in the wake of what he’d just accomplished. The way Ollie moved with an obvious finish line in his metaphorical field of vision said they were on the same page. Coming unraveled together was another tick in Roy’s dedication to the craft, and so, with all the delirium of any of their exploits, he panted his words around the rocking thrusts. “Yes, yes! Want it, come on—!” Stuttered, sure, with perhaps too much revealed in his tone, but Ollie moaned along with a particularly vicious thrust that made Roy want to fight against the overstimulation, even though the bar kept him as spread and docile as he had been throughout the night. The constant strikes abusing his insides made him ache in a way that felt so intimate he almost sobbed a distressed sound but caught himself a split-second before he could.

 _ _Do it,__ he wanted to beg, __open me up, make me yours yours yours.__

Blearily, he wrapped his fists around the headboard bars and faced the wall so he could be heard when he asked, only halfway a tease, “Proud’a me yet?”

Oliver groaned, leaning over to sink his teeth in Roy’s shoulder. He could feel every twitch and pulse as the man emptied inside, but he didn’t stop moving—simply slowed to shallow, tight circles, and the filthy sounds they were already making with the excess lubricant seemed to worsen with the addition of the cum now dripping out of him while he rocked, breathless, into the hand Ollie curled around him.

“Always,” he murmured against the nape of Roy’s neck.

His mouth opened as if to make a sound, but for a few seconds of transition all he did was hold his breath, until he couldn’t take the sparks and added to their already egregious mess with a jerk forward and a loud, “ _Fuck,_ I love you.”

He didn’t stop shaking until he felt Ollie pull out and begin unhooking the bar from his thighs, and the instant it was removed, he crashed with a weary sigh while the restraints around his ankles and wrists came next, each extremity rubbed according to severity of the marks left behind.

“You good there, kid?” Oliver asked, and Roy didn’t have to look to know he was giving him that stupid, adoring smile of his.

He hid his own in the pillow. “Always,” he said.


End file.
